Bethesda Collection

Here’s official news on the second Skyrim expansion, Hearthfire. The hook here is that you get to build yourself a home from the ground up, which involves finding yourself a patch of land then building and expanding a building appropriate to your tastes/budget upon it. It’s the Sims in dragon-addled Scandinavia, essentially. Apparently you can also adopt children, but hopefully not by abducting them from happy NPC families.Take a look below. (more…)

After a couple of months spent kneeling at the altar of Microsoft exclusivity, Skyrim’s first expansion Dawnguard has made its expensive way to the admirably-supported PC version. It brings vampires and it brings vampire hunters – but will it bring the game-changing of Bloodmoon or the deflation of Shivering Isles? Gaze into my proud undead eyes, human cattle, and allow me to seduce you into reading on.> (more…)

It says something about John Carmack’s status in the gaming industry that he can hold a talk that lasts for three and a half hours> and the majority of watchers are simply delighted. So, if you’ve got nothing else on for the next 210 minutes, here is said relaxed, cheerful, full-throttle, ad-libbed and fascinating QuakeCon speech in full. id’s brain o’brains chats about the problems with Rage and its messy PC launch, his love-hate relationship with the PC as a platform, those Oculus Rift VR goggles that are getting Kickstarted hearts all aflutter, Doom 3 BFG, 3D displays, just the tiniest smidgen on Doom 4 and, of course, a sustained stream of characteristically uncensored techspeak about the past, present and future of computing. Such as viewing images by firing laser beams directly into people’s retinas. Er…

Impressively, as well as talking for so damned long, he doesn’t sit down until the 90-minute point. (more…)

Bethesda are saying (at QuakeCon) that Dawnguard PC is out at last right now, but I can’t get it come up on Steam just yet. But oh well, I’m sure it’s either a caching thing or it’ll be there any moment – me, I’ve just got to postpostpost and then sleepsleepsleep. Here’s the official word though. I’m hearing it’s $20 for the long-awaited, Vampire-centric Skyrim add-on. Now I’m off to clean my teeth. Good luck, enjoy, and see you tomorrow.

Update: and here it is on Steam to buy now. $20/£14 to you, sir or madam. That is not> cheap as DLC goes, and the reviews were mixed, but I’ve not played it yet so don’t look to me for answers. Unless they’re about cats or Transformers, anyway.

That’s not to say that it’s not coming out, just that there’s no announcement, and that we should therefore not expect its imminent release – which was something we wondered about with the advent of the recent patch. Pete Hines, who tweeted the news of the non-announcement, followed up by saying “I was simply stating that expecting/demanding something today is unfounded. Not that news is never coming.” SO MAYBE IT WILL BE ANNOUNCED. IT’S ANYONE’S GUESS.

Oh well, anyway, that’s a shame. We’d just imagined it had been announced. I’m going to pass the time waiting for announcement by installing one bajillion mods from Skyrim’s Steam Workshop and seeing what happens. Crabs wearing monocles, probably.

It’s odd to look back to the many frustrations of Skyrim’s launch, all those PC-specific oversights and technical flaws that drove us spare, and how so many (but not all, I know – modding the UI is still all but vital, for instance) of them have since been addressed. New textures, 2GB RAM cap lifted, sound quality bug sorted, mounted combat added… What seemed to be a fairly perfunctory PC version has been nurtured to fuller health in the days since launch, and that continues with patch 1.7, now in beta on Steam. There isn’t much in the way of big revelations, but “General memory and stability optimizations” is the kind of thing that’s always good to hear. I wish someone would optimise my> stability. (more…)

While we’re talking Id, there’s something else that came out of E3 that you might find interesting. Bethesda frontman Pete Hines told Eurogamer that despite the lukewarm reception for Rage, they have big plans for it: “We’re looking at doing some things with Rage. But obviously the first thing out of anybody’s lips now when we talk about id is not, hey, what else is up with Rage? They’re asking the question they’ve been asking for five years, six years, seven years, which is, where’s Doom 4? What about Doom 4? As far as where we are with Rage, the future for that is still TBD.”

Which is interesting, because whatever the do with Doom, I felt like Rage was a move in the right direction, but didn’t quite go all out on any of the things that it was hinting at. The half-formed racing, half-formed exploration, half-formed crafting, all pointed to a deeper game which, if they concentrate on just one of those elements next time, might yet yield something beyond the usual adventure with shotguns. Id are also working on another shooter, which has yet to be revealed.

When Skyrim’s Dawnguard DLC was announced, we were worried it might end up just being a pair of equippable contact lenses. A new prE3 trailer shows that it’s actually some manner of major expansion with attempts to blot out the sun being made and all sorts. What seems clear is that players will be faced with a choice; do you wish to live in a graveyard and eat people, all supernatural-like, or would you rather have a pair of equippable contact lenses? See for yourself.

I have ridden horses before. They’re swift, terrifying creatures, and while I attempted to maintain a dignified posture befitting of my stature as Someone Who’s Technically From Texas, it was pretty obvious that I was mostly hanging on for dear life. Apparently, though, in addition to the ability to fell dragons with the gentlest of whispers, the Dragonborn will soon be capable of fighting from the back of a horse>. Like, without careening off its back in a blur of blood, bones, and white hot terror. That, I believe, is the mark of a true hero.

I’ve always been a fan of the gag where a TV show or what have you spends ages building to something, only to air an absurdly quick segment and then roll the credits at blink-and-you’ll-miss-them-and-now-my-TV’s-a-time-space-vortex speed. I see what they’re doing there, even when I can’t physically see> what they doing there. With Skyrim’s Dawnguard DLC, though, I think Bethesda just created the game announcement equivalent. After weeks of rumor-mongering, hinting, and teasing, the developer announced… an announcement. We now have a name, that dashingly glowy-eyed face, and an assurance that it’s “coming this summer to Xbox 360″ (which means one month after that for everyone else) and we can look forward to “more details at E3.”